Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day014.17
Last-Modified: 2000/07/20
Q. What is this reference then to the gas chamber victims and
the Zyklon-B fumes?
A. Well ----
Q. The mask slipped again, has it?
A. No, but we saw in the drawings that have been shown to us
by Professor van Pelt the gold aubeit, the rooms where the
smelting furnace was contained.
Q. Sure.
A. It is well-known that in the mortuaries they ripped the
gold teeth out of the victims.
Q. But, Mr Irving, "these gold teeth", according to you,
"came from the bodies of gas chamber victims taken by SS
. P-148
dentists somehow immune to the Zyklon fumes which had
dispatched the victims."
A. Yes, this is one of the eyewitness statements that is
obviously baloney because they could not have gone in there.
Q. What is it doing in this article, Mr Irving, by you in 1997?
A. I cannot quite understand the point you are making or the
question you are asking.
Q. Why are you making reference to this if you do not believe
it to be true?
A. Why am I making reference to this if I do not believe to
be true.
Q. Yes. Why are you, a Holocaust denier in full fledged
condition in 1997, making reference to dead people from
the gas chambers having their teeth, gold teeth ripped out
by the SS dentists?
A. But I have just said, it is accepted by all parties that
the Nazis gangsters stole the gold teeth from their victims.
Q. Again you are dodging the point.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: You are dodging the gas chamber element.
A. Your Lordship, can you rephrase the question for me so I
can understand it?
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes. What Mr Rampton is putting to is that
it sounds as if you are accepting in what you there say
. P-149
that there were indeed gas chamber victims who had their
gold fillings removed by SS dentists.
A. I do not think so, my Lord.
Q. Why not?
A. The whole tenor of that is supposed to be disbelieving to
the point of mockery, and the reason I say that is they
are helping to regenerate the ill-gotten stereotype of the
ugly greedy Jew. If you will carry on to the next
paragraph but one, you will see the source of that
particular criticism by me. I freely admit to having
stolen the criticism from Heim Bermont who is a very wise
English writer indeed who wrote for the Jewish Chronicle
and who interviewed me once. He made precisely the same
criticism, that by helping to create or recreate this
public perception, this public image, of the grab-all
rich, wealthy Jew, they were generating fresh
anti-Semitism with this gold campaign.
MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving ----
A. And Heim Bermont went on to say that the truth is, as
everybody knows, that most Jews are in fact not rich and wealthy.
Q. We see in the middle of that, you draw our attention to it ----
A. Yes.
Q. --- in middle of that paragraph, two on, on the other side
of the column ----
. P-150
A. Yes.
Q. --- after you have quoted Heim Burman, you say:
"Commenting on the squabbles that had already broken out
between rival factions ... and the anti-defamation league,
all of whom want their pound of Swiss flesh." Whose words
are those?
A. Probably Bermont. I have quoted Bermont.
Q. It is not in quotes.
A. Bermont wrote a savage leading article in the Jewish
Chronicle. I have never seen an article written -- if a
non-Jew had written that he would be described as being
viciously anti-Semitic.
Q. It is a reference to the unsympathetic portrait of Jewish
nature presented by William Shakespeare in the Merchant of
Venice, is it not?
A. Yes.
Q. It is your reference and not Mr Bermont's, is it not?
A. Whether it is mine or Mr Bermont's I do not know, but
placed where that it is in a paragraph which starts with
Bermont and ends with Bermont, I am pretty certain it
comes from Bermont.
Q. Can we go back to the paragraph on the left-hand side of the page?
A. Yes.
Q. You say: "All the elements of anti-Semitic stereotype are there"?
. P-151
A. The stereotype.
Q. Yes.
A. Yes.
Q. I know. I have heard what you said about it. What I want
to know is why the rest of it is there: "The cosmopolitan
rootless millionaire bereft of any local patriotism".
Where does that stereotype come from?
A. That is part of the stereotype.
Q. It is, is it?
A. Yes.
Q. In whose mind?
A. It is part of the general anti-Semitic stereotype of the Jew.
Q. Which is you are busy promoting here, are you not?
A. No. I am not quoting in fact -- shall I bring in the
article that Bermont wrote? I am pretty sure I can find
it or get it from his web site.
Q. It has all this stuff, does it, about ----
A. The only thing I admit which Bermont did not write was
where I said that the weddings rings may have come off the
lifeless fingers of the Hamburg victims or the Dresden air
raid victims, because I happen to know that our witness
Hans Voight collected three buckets of wedding rings off
the fingers of lifeless victims of the Dresden air raids,
and they went to the Reichsbank and they were filmed in
the Reichsbank subsequently for the Nuremberg trial.
. P-152
I have the record of the Nuremberg trial officers who
said: "Unfortunately we cannot use that film of the gold
rings found in the Reichsbank because we have no evidence
it came from concentration camps".
MR JUSTICE GRAY: So you are saying part of the stereotype is
true and part is not?
A. Well, most of the stereotype is untrue, but this is what
the Jewish people, the community, rightly objected, that
they have gained this stereotype somehow and Bermont has
written this warning editorial in the Jewish Chronicle
saying: Here we go again, we are just helping create it
again because a few self-appointed leaders of the Jewish
community, whether they are Abraham Foxman or Charles
Edgar Bronson, or whoever it is, are going about this
ill-advised campaign against the Swiss, which is just
helping to reinforce the ugly stereotype.
MR RAMPTON: While we are in this volume, Mr Irving can we just
pick up that reference to the pound of flesh, please?
A. Yes.
Q. It seems to be one of your themes, if I may say so. Page
50 of the same volume, my Lord. This is page 23 at the
top of the clip. I am going to read from the clip,
because my copy of the article has been sliced off by the
machine. There is a paragraph on the right-hand side
beside the box in the middle which begins "Finally". Do
you have that?
. P-153
A. Yes.
Q. "Will Jon Dem Janjung [Transcription note: John Demjanjuk]
now sue his tormentors" and it is
all about ----
A. Yes.
Q. --- that man.
A. Yes, the most shocking episode in American judicial
history I think.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: What, that he got acquitted?
A. He was finally acquitted on the orders of the Israeli
judges, except he had been framed and set up by eleven
false eyewitnesses, as one man identified him, and the
Israeli Supreme Court set him free.
MR RAMPTON: Mr Irving, I am tempted to say "so what" but if I
do you will produce a life size portrait of Mr Dem Janjung
I dare say. Really, Mr Irving, you did not mean that.
Page 23, my Lord.
A. You do not always get the answers you need, Mr Rampton.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Page 23 of the little clip.
MR RAMPTON: I did not ask you about Mr Dem Janjung. That was
one of your offerings, Mr Irving.
A. You asked me about the paragraph.
Q. And then you gave us a long lecture about something which
has nothing to do with this case.
A. Perhaps you should not have paused.
Q. What you have actually written is this: "The world will
not easily forget how, even when" ----
. P-154
A. "Even when acquitted after all".
Q. Do not give me another pitiful lecture about Mr Dem
Janjung, please?
A. You are just going to read what I wrote.
Q. "Dem Janjung was detained in custody by his enemies for
two more weeks while they thumbed through their sweaty
manuals looking for some way to crush him that they might
have overlooked. Nor how when they failed again these
shylocks cheated on their pray, frog marched him to his
plane home to freedom still in handcuffs like a convicted criminal."
I quite agree that one can take the view that it
was a disgraceful prosecution. The fact that the
prosecution was made by Israelis, who one must assume were
Jewish, do you think that that justifies the use of
language like this?
A. I do not think these particular lawyers are above
criticism, and that was a criticism I chose to level at
them. I think they are below, beneath criticism, these people.
Q. Why the shylocks though?
A. Because they wanted -- you know the Shakespearian
quotation?
Q. Yes, Mr Irving.
A. They wanted their final pound of flesh. Although he had
been acquitted by the Supreme Court they kept him in jail
. P-155
and they frog marched him in handcuffs although he was a
free and innocent man. What better description of it is
there than that? I repeat, these people are not above
criticism just because they happen to be Jews, believe
me. They are beneath contempt for it. They tried to hang
him for political reasons.
Q. On the next page 51, I do not know what this issue is, May
1995 I think, my Lord, this is page 26 at 1.7 (c). You
are writing something about Wiesenthalers Zap Jap Crap,
whatever you mean by that. This is full of stuff about
Israel and Jews.
A. Either read the whole article or do not make any comments on it.
Q. I am not the least bit interested in, as it were, your
themes in your articles, Mr Irving. I am Interested in
your terminology. That is why I drew attention to your
use of the word "shylocks".
A. Zap, Jap or Crap, which is the word?
Q. I now look at the bottom of the right-hand column of this
article and I see this: "Overshadowed by the gloating
vulpine figure of Rabbi Cooper himself."
A. I cannot see this.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is right at the bottom right-hand corner.
MR RAMPTON: It has a 3 against it.
A. A 3?
MR JUSTICE GRAY: The right-hand column right at the bottom.
. P-156
A. Yes.
MR RAMPTON: "The gloating vulpine figure", does that remind
you of any sort of propaganda put out at any time in
recent European history, Mr Irving?
A. No. It sounds rather Churchillian to me.
Q. Have you got your Goebbels book there?
A. Have you ever read Churchill's speeches about Adolf
Hitler? Exactly the same kind of language.
Q. Neither of them is on trial here.
A. August 1941, a magnificent speech that Churchill made,
oddly enough shortly after he had read the first police
decodes of the crimes on the Eastern Front. He used
exactly this kind of terminology.
Q. Mr Irving, you tried to lead us down that road before.
I tried to suggest that Mr Churchill might have had some
reason to be beastly about nice Mr Hitler.
A. Well, you asked for an answer and you do not like the
answer you get.
Q. That reminds you of Churchill, does it?
A. You asked me about the language.
Q. Yes, I did.
A. And I am telling you that it is Churchillian language.

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